Do the times make the leader, or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader infuse people’s lives with a sense of purpose and meaning?

These are among the questions that Doris Kearns Goodwin explores in her new book, Leadership in Turbulent Times, which examines four singular styles of leadership: transformative, crisis management, turnaround, and visionary. She follows the course of leadership development in the careers of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, providing case histories that illustrate the skills and strengths that enabled these four men to lead the United States through periods of great upheaval.

The article that follows is excerpted from her case study of Lincoln’s pivotal decision to issue and guide to fruition the Emancipation Proclamation—a purpose that required the support of the cabinet, the army, and, ultimately, the American people. Rarely, Goodwin notes, was a leader better suited to the challenge of the fractured historical moment. Struggle had been his birthright; resilience his keystone strength. Possessed of a powerful emotional intelligence, Lincoln was both merciful and merciless, confident and humble, patient and persistent—able to mediate among factions and sustain the spirits of his countrymen. He displayed an extraordinary ability to absorb the conflicting wills of a divided people and reflect back to them an unbending faith in a unified future.

David Hain's insight:

"Rarely, was a leader better suited to the challenge of the fractured historical moment." The author is talking about Abraham Lincoln, slavery and the Civil War. I couldn't help thinking about Brexit as I read this, but we have no Abraham Lincoln in sight, unfortunately.

Overall, the Drucker Forum was packed with speakers and their brilliant opinions on what’s wrong with managementand its inhumane way of operating. There simply needed to be more examples of how we can fix it. Over the years of its existence, the Drucker Forum has made great strides regarding global representation, as well as gender and cultural diversity. For example, the 2018 version saw a record number of women participate as chairs or speakers. Thirty-eight percent is impressive. By 2019, I hope it becomes 50 percent.

If there was one comment that should act as a call to action for attendees, it came from Paul Polman (ex Unilever CEO):

“You’re not going to solve problems by attending conferences. You have to do something. If you don’t take action, you’re as guilty as those who created the problems in the first place.”

“Do something,” is the perfect manner in which to say we need more examples of the how.

David Hain's insight:

Strong on diagnosis, not so hot when it comes to practiacl solutions - thoughtful musings on the latest Drucker forum from Dan Pontefract.

Patience, the ability to keep calm in the face of disappointment, distress or suffering, is worth cultivating. The virtue is associated with a variety of positive health outcomes, such as reducing depression and other negative emotions. Researchers have also concluded that patient people exhibit more prosocial behaviors like empathy, and were more likely to display generosity and compassion.

A 2012 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology identified three distinct expressions of patience: 1. Interpersonal, which is maintaining calm when dealing with someone who is upset, angry or being a pest. 2. Life hardships, or finding the silver lining after a serious setback. And 3. Daily hassles, which is suppressing annoyance at delays or anything irritating that would inspire a snarky tweet.

The good news is that same study found that patience as a personality trait is modifiable. Even if you’re not a particularly patient person today, there’s still hope you can be a more patient person tomorrow. So if you find yourself getting exasperated more than you’d like, here are ways to keep those testy impulses in check.

David Hain's insight:

Nice essay on patience, a lifetime quest for me and many others. The advice here to modify my habits makes sense.

Let’s be clear about this: in business, as in life, there isn’t always one correct answer. So the teaching of a decision-making philosophy that is deliberate and systematic, but still open-minded, is hardly controversial on its face. But to help students overcome the fear of sounding stupid and being remorselessly critiqued, they are reminded, in case after case—and with emphasis—that there are no right answers. And that has had the unfortunate effect of opening up a chasm of moral equivalence in too many of their graduates.

And yet, there are obviously many situations where some answers are more right than others. Especially when it comes to moral issues like privacy, around which both Sandberg and Facebook have a history of demonstrating poor judgment. While H.B.S. is correct in its assertion that it produces people who can make decisions, the fact of the matter is that they have never emphasized how to make the right ones.

David Hain's insight:

Moral judgements - tricky for all of us. Is Facebook living up to it's promises? This article reckons it's all Harvard's fault, withsome reasonable,if selective, justifications.

The simplest questions sometimes hold the greatest potential for insight. As a leader, consider this one: Would you follow you? Not you on your best day, or your worst day, but on a typical day — when you’re communicating, solving problems, and making decisions with the natural tendencies that shape the character of your unique leadership style.

This question matters because when you’re just being you in the company of your team, bosses, and clients, you are continuously showing whether you are someone to trust.

If you’re authentic and fully invested in making an impact while enhancing the experience of those around you, then you strengthen your case. Conversely, if you’re inauthentic or let yourself be silenced in the moments that matter, your case weakens every time you withdraw.

David Hain's insight:

All leaders are role models, like it or not. Good article on why we might as well make our behavious as a role model intentional.

The emerging world of customer value is prospering, growing, and thriving in real terms while inspiring and energizing those involved in it, and continuing to evolve and reinvent itself.

The world of shareholder value is declining in real terms, and dispiriting those involved in it, even those few who are enjoying its large but ephemeral financial fruits. The true measures of its progress are not the booming stock market or the short-term benefits to shareholders but rather the sputtering real economy, the despair of large segments of the population who experience stagnating wages, the unraveling social fabric, and the political stalemate in the face of grave issues.

Isn’t it time that mainstream economists caught up with what’s happening in the real world, as opposed to their make-believe world of economic models?

David Hain's insight:

As more and more customers realise the state of the planet and the stagnation of wages in an attempt to squeeze profits, surely it is time to question whether companies should still be worshipping at the altar of shareholder value?

As I look back on the last five Drucker Forum’s that I have attended, the best talks have been those that shed light on how to make Drucker’s great insight a reality. The talks had many different labels. They spoke of Innovation Management, or Design Thinking, or Value Propositions, or the principles of the Mittelstand companies, or Agile, or Business Agility, or the Business Model Canvas, or a new Economic Theory of Value, or Adhocracy, or Humanistic Management, or whatever.

When we look beneath these labels, we can see a common thread running through the best of the talks aimed at putting into practice Peter Drucker’s great insight. Work, firms, management are in their essence about human beings creating customers by generating delight in their products or services.

David Hain's insight:

Steve Denning, in praise of Peter Drucker. Both on the money, as usual. what is a firm for if not or creating customers. Such a simple idea, but in today's confused and complex world, a beacon of simple clarity.

The thing I learned is that the elements of a great leader are, in a lot of ways, the same elements of a great person. Some people have this idea that leaders act a certain way and have a certain bravado about them. I actually think the truth is far from that, and that the people others want to follow are those who are true to themselves, have authenticity in their relationships, and are great people.

You really want to work for great people, so realizing that being a great leader was just being a better person is very liberating in a lot of ways.”

David Hain's insight:

We are human beings first, bosses, supervisors or leaders by result of perceptions held by others. Maybe one route to being an excellent leader is to concentrate foremost on being an excellent human being?

In his novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami introduces a character called Aka. He is an aspiring educator, someone training company employees. Aka declares the following:

“One thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They’re actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that’s how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they’d be clueless.”

Tsukuru, Aka’s colleague, is appalled by the cynicism of his friend’s view of humanity.

But maybe – just maybe – Aka is right. Perhaps most people really do want simply to follow orders; they don’t want to think for themselves. And if Aka’s view of the world is correct, what are the implications?

In a wealthy society replete with opportunity, perhaps there are few sadder sights than a well-educated 50-year-old still in employment, still reporting to a boss, still working a five-day week, still fearful of stepping out of line and still dependent on the beneficence of others.

David Hain's insight:

Too much leadership and hierarchy breeds too much followership? Impacts on degree of initiative, self-determination and accountability.

Evidence is mounting that conventional approaches to strategic human capital management are broken. This is particularly true for performance management (PM) systems—the appraisal approaches in which employees (working with their managers) set goals for the year; managers interview others who have worked with them and write up an appraisal; employees are rated and ranked numerically; and salary, bonus, and promotion opportunities are awarded accordingly. A 2013 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management asked HR professionals about the quality of their own PM systems; only 23 percent said their company was above average in the way it conducted them. Other studies uncovered even more disdain. According to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a management research group, surveys have found that 95 percent of managers are dissatisfied with their PM systems, and 90 percent of HR heads believe they do not yield accurate information.

The performance management systems in many companies are misleading, cumbersome, and complex, requiring some HR departments to put aside an entire quarter to manage them. More important, they can be counterproductive. In the context of neuroscience research, most PM practices turn out to damage the performance they are intended to improve. That’s because they are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human responses, as revealed in recurring patterns of mental activity.

David Hain's insight:

Want to make a huge difference to motivation in your organisation and bring a growth mindset to the staff? Zap the performance ranking system and replace with regular learning conversations! There are many reasons why, eloquently explained here.

How do you make decisions? Sometimes, you might use a planned, scientific process, but you’re probably making many decisions on autopilot, by using your gut or guessing. Maybe your decision-making ability is limited because of situational constraints.

It's a lot to think about!

Unfortunately, as author Daniel Pink argues, we rarely stop to think, is this the right timing? And even if we did, how would we know what the right timing is?

The author of “Drive” and other best-sellers was a keynote speaker Sept. 23 at the 104th ICMA Annual Conference in Baltimore, Md. His most recent book, “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,” is an exploration of all the science behind the timing of beginnings, midpoints and endings.

The book is more than a catalogue of random science, however; it is an attempt to connect research into timing from a variety of fields and discover insights that people can apply in their everyday lives.

David Hain's insight:

Turns out there is quite a bit of science behind how best to time things. Dan Pink's latest book is all about it - but for the time-poor, this short read has a few key ideas...

An invitation to step in and turn a team or function around is a significant vote of confidence in your abilities and a potential career enhancement opportunity. Of course, first, you’ve got to get it right. Here are some hard-won tips on navigating and succeeding when you’re the management fixer.

David Hain's insight:

Art Petty on a tried and tested process of how to address turnaround activities as a manager. Good advice!

In this fast-paced digital economy, it’s impossible to see the changes that are on the horizon. That makes it difficult for leaders to prepare for what’s ahead. In her best-selling books, Changing on the Job, and Simple Habits for Complex Times, author and developmental coach Jennifer Garvey Berger teaches the skills and habits you can adopt today to make you more agile and adaptable to any scenario.

During our discussion, we explore some of the methods Jennifer uses to help individuals become better listeners, better learners, and better leaders. There was so much wisdom in this interview that it was difficult to decide what excerpts to share.

David Hain's insight:

There is a lot of leadership wisdom in this podcast from the always excellent Farnam Street blog site.

The 9-grid is typically one of the HR tools designed in the last century. I think it was designed by McKinsey for GE, probably together with the famous principle: always get rid of your bottom 10% low performers. I have used the 9-grid a lot, and I have spent hours in sessions with senior management (“calibration meetings”), discussing the exact place of the potentials in the grid. In hindsight, I think this was generally a waste of time. In my view, we should get rid of the 9-grid.

David Hain's insight:

Do your organistion a favour - ditch the 9-box grid! Outdated, biased, artificially 'fair' and divisive. Has done lasting damage to many people, and gives managers an excuse not to provide regular feedback. Spend those wasted levelling discussions with 1:1s and team meetings!

What do you do for work? Not, what is your job title, or what’s written in your official job description? But what do you actually do?

It’s potentially the most important question you can ask yourself if you care about standing out, staying ahead of the change curve, and continuously elevating your performance to gain access to choice assignments and opportunities to advance.

This is because the value you deliver, the results you produce, and the impact you have on others come more often from the execution of unspoken intangibles that are not reflected in your title, job description, or the daily tasks and activities you’re responsible for. This severe mismatch is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the true demands of work.

David Hain's insight:

Most people have two jobs - one of which is implicit, intangible, much more complex than the typical job description - and essential to success. Useful article from a PWC coach on identifying the hidden world that underpins your job.

We all have attributes that simultaneously work for us and against us. The solution is not to subdue our strengths but to add ingredients that balance them out. In other words, build complementary skills.

David Hain's insight:

Excellent coaching advice from Peter Bregman - for practising coaches or people who act as their own coach.

Today, business founders such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or even Larry Fink epitomise a new class of celebrity CEOs, seen by so many as personal heroes who can save the world, and the same goes for the larger array of employee CEOs such as Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Tim Cook at Apple. Yet all the while, CEOs participate in a world economy wracked by increasing inequality, as epitomised by the kind of obscene CEO remuneration that sees the likes of Amazon’s boss Jeff Bezos earning almost a million times that of the workers in his warehouses.

David Hain's insight:

Why do we need heroes, when experience suggests that a) they are rarely without flaws and b) that leadership is increasingly proven to be a collaborative, whole systems enterprise? Interesting opinion piece from Carl Rhodes and Peter Bloom.

I know there are about 1 Billion articles and books on change. I’ve read many of them. The list below is stuff I have used, mostly successfully, to lead some big organizational, process and culture changes that involved teams from 60–1,200. They are people-focused. Because change is people-focused.

You might use one or two or all of them depending on the scale and complexity of the changes you want to make. I’m not giving you a step-by-step, just general themes on which you can build. As always, take what you like, and leave the rest.

Left unchecked, subconscious biases will undermine strategic decision making. Here’s how to counter them and improve corporate performance.

Once heretical, behavioral economics is now mainstream. Money managers employ its insights about the limits of rationality in understanding investor behavior and exploiting stock-pricing anomalies. Policy makers use behavioral principles to boost participation in retirement-savings plans. Marketers now understand why some promotions entice consumers and others don’t.

Yet very few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases—systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations—revealed by behavioral economics. It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases. So despite growing awareness of behavioral economics and numerous efforts by management writers, including ourselves, to make the case for its application, most executives have a justifiably difficult time knowing how to harness its power.

David Hain's insight:

When making important business decisions, rational analysis alone is not enough. Classic McKinsey article on how to implement behavioural processes that improve the chances of making better decisions.

Ultimately, the greatest value of holacracy may be the idea of holacracy itself. It may not work for every company, but its premise is revolutionary. In essence, it asks for more soulfulness at work—for all of us, no matter our job title, to show up with more intentionality every day. It asks for us to engage with the terrifying act of transcending our egos.

“Look at the stuff that gets in the way of humans connecting fully as humans,” says Robertson. “It’s the politics, bureaucracy—instead of us being vulnerable, authentic creatures that fail. Let’s get a lot of that out of the way.”

David Hain's insight:

Interesting article about the history and practice of holacracy. It probably isn't the future of work - much to complex for most organisations. But it points us firmly in the direction of a more human workplace where people at all levels act on their responsibilities in an atmosphere of common purpose. David Marquet's "Turn the Ship Around" never once mentions holacracy - but it does offfer a compelling story about a method of developing leaders at ever level.

Batching is the simple habit of performing like-minded tasks together instead of bouncing from one task to the next.

We live in a bouncing time. Mental bouncing, task bouncing. Enter Adam Grant, award-winning rock star author and the highest-rated professor at The Wharton School. In his terrific book “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” Grand Central Publishing/2016), Cal Newport describes how the prolific Adam Grant batches his time.

Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching his students. By batching his teaching in the fall, Grant can then turn his attention fully to research in the spring and summer … Grant also batches his work on a smaller time scale. Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods when his door is open to students and colleagues, and periods when he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (Deep Work, page 39)

David Hain's insight:

Achim Nowak and Adam Grant on how batching like-work together can improve productivity and quality.

We owe much of Berrett-Koehler’s success to “eating our own cooking”—putting the ideas espoused by these and other books we have published into practice in our own company.

In my chart The New Leadership Paradigm I lay out ten dimensions of the old command-and-control leadership paradigm and ten corresponding dimensions of the new paradigm, which might be called “shared leadership,” “servant leadership,” or “collaborative leadership.”

These ten dimensions were drawn from concepts in BK books. But they also reflect experiences I have had over the years—both those described above and many other experiences interacting with numerous organizations.

David Hain's insight:

Berrett-Koehler is one of the very best publishers of personal and organisational growth books. Partly because they try to walk their talk. Here's why. Includes access to useful download that can help to start a great discussion about how things get done.

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